The Visual Studio Code team continues to add Java functionality to Microsoft's open source, cross-platform code editor via extensions, just launching a new batch for working with Maven, Tomcat and Checkstyle.

Cloud services used for developing, building and deploying AWS applications now support .NET Core, a lightweight, open source, modular platform used to create Web applications and services for Windows, Linux and Mac OSes.

Microsoft this week clarified how iOS development will work with the new Xamarin-based tooling announced at the recent Build developers conference: It's easier, but a Mac will still be needed at some point.

After Microsoft today announced the general availability of Visual Studio for Mac, many developers on forum sites questioned if it's really the same IDE that Windows users have known and loved for years, or a refactored, rebadged and rebranded version of Xamarin Studio -- and no less than Xamarin chief Miguel de Icaza himself weighed in with some answers.

With the long-awaited Visual Studio 2017 finally rolling out this week, here's a look at some user-requested features that didn't make into Microsoft's flagship IDE, and some that are on track for future releases.

Microsoft said mobile app development was "top of mind" as it built the newly released Visual Studio 2017 IDE, which is now chock full of options to create apps for the major platforms using multiple tools and languages.

As part of the new Visual Studio 2017 release candidate, Microsoft has beefed up the build and debug functionality of its Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO), which allows mobile developers to create iOS and Android apps using JavaScript.

In its push to spur Windows 10 and Universal Windows Platform development, Microsoft has placed a new community toolkit on the GitHub open source code repository, featuring animations, controls, code helpers and more.